By: Danny Jacobs

I’ve admittedly been a slacker in my announced effort to track the annotations of Judge Glenn T. Harrell Jr. in his written opinions for the Court of Appeals.

Then Harrell himself provided just the jolt I needed last week in his opinion concerning the validity of a three-judge panel’s ruling when one of the judges dies before the decision is issued, which I wrote about in today’s paper.

It’s right in the first sentence: “With the filing of this opinion, this Court will have completed a ‘Goldilocks’ trilogy,” a reference to two prior cases also dealing with the proper amount of judges needed for a proceeding. The footnote cites a folklore dictionary.

Thus inspired, I reviewed Harrell’s other decisions from this year. A March 12 opinion concering real property ownership begins, “This fracas over lebensraum.“ The German word means “living space” but, as a concept, is most closely associated with Hitler’s plan to expand Germany’s borders under the Third Reich.

In the same opinion, Harrell uses the word “demurrer,” defining it in a footnote for “our newer generations of lawyers” because the term is no longer part of pleading requirements in the state.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more updates — provided I don’t forget again.